Back in the 80s and early 90s, sound was a huge deal, going from synthetic beeps to full audio playback and you needed to fiddle with a dedicated soundcard to enjoy the latest breakthroughs. Nowadays, hardly anyone bothers because all computers have "good enough" sound out of the box.

I find it quite fascinating to think whether something similar might be possible for, say, graphics cards. It seems impossible now, but imagine a monitor at the max resolution your eye can see and real time 3D graphics with enough polygons to never see an edge and all the basic shading/lighting problems solved to Pixar levels... that might be less than 10 years away.

Related: http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/05/12/...

We're currently on the cusp of the machine learning paradigm shift. As ML keeps getting better, it will start showing up more and more in consumer interfaces. I'm willing to bet that within a few decades natural language interfaces will become the norm. The desktop paradigm will simply go away at that point.

You'll just tell the computer what you want to do instead of having to juggle windows using the mouse and keyboard. You'll be able to say find that youtube video, play this song, or reply to that email.

The computer will most likely turn into a personal assistant, and these kinds of machines will require a lot more power than what we currently have in desktops.

Your phone/computer's speech recognition is done by your phone/computer recording your voice and sending it to Microsoft/Apple/Google, then Microsoft/Apple/Google transcribing it on THEIR computers, storing your data, and sending the transcription back to your phone/computer.

It doesn't require any processing power on your computer, besides the power to record and send your voice.

You seem to think that because you bought a computer, that means that it's going to be your "personal assistant" unconditionally. It's not. It's going to give your voiceprint, location information, and other personally identifying information to MS/AAPL/GOOG. F/OSS might get similar features but they will lag years behind, and will not have the same impact on society that large corporations with datacenters/server farms can have. Eventually, you'll start seeing friendly suggestions and helpful tips, like your traffic schedule (this is already the case).

You'll receive SUGGESTIONS on where to go. Friendly suggestions like, "Did you mean to go to the strip club/bar? How about going to church instead?"

This could amplify inequality. Imagine Microsoft Clippy saying, "Hi, I noticed that you need $350 for crack rocks. May I suggest Honest Achmed's Pawn Shop only 1.2 miles from your trap house? We compared prices of the Internet of Things enabled devices you have on Amazon and we noticed that your 202X Macbook has a resale value of about $350."

You'll eventually be CONTROLLED by some algorithm somewhere.

There's nothing PERSONAL about the assistance they'll provide.

Sure, however this approach has a lot of downsides, such as utter lack of privacy. As we've seen many times historically the pendulum swings between thin and thick clients.

Right now the computational power needed to do this kind of processing is very expensive so it's done on server. However, faster hardware will make it possible to do it on personal devices as well.

Also worth pointing out that privacy doesn't exist for most people already. The mode of interaction with the computer isn't going to change any of that one way or the other.

The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it's semantic insight. They need to have an innate ability to learn the meaning of new things without being programmed to do so. As far as I know siri, cortana and google do not do this. Meaning must be programmed into them explicitly. That doesn't scale. Yes, they can learn new things, but they learn them slowly. You can even build advanced intelligent things like self-driving cars (with great effort) because the required level of understanding about the world is very constrained. However, you cannot scale it up to general purpose assistants because the amount of code required cannot be built in any reasonable amount of time. Until we have algorithms that create algorithms, software rewriting itself and evolving based on higher goals, we won't see the promised star-trek-level personal assistants come to fruition.

It could go either way. Let us hope you are right.

There's a massive jump you're making here, I feel. From where we are to "computer, invent a new novel for me" there's a huge range of useful mid-points.

One level is just understanding more about human-written unstructured data to answer questions.

Another is to be better at sending commands to other humans.

Third there's linking these things up. Understanding where there are gaps in the knowledge, who might be able to fill them in and then asking them the right questions. I know there was work done in this area as part of CoSY back in 2004-2008 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/ which was followed with http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogx/

This then gets you to the level of essentially free personal assistants for a wide range of general tasks. That would be valuable to a very large number of people.

We're just starting to explore machine learning in any meaningful sense. I think the progress we've seen already bodes tremendously well for AI assistants.

>The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it's semantic insight.

I absolutely agree. We won't see general purpose assistants in the near future, but that doesn't mean we won't see specialized assistants. Something like the desktop is a fairly constrained environment.

A lot of what you'd need to do is already being done by systems like Google search. You can type in a random term and it will often do an excellent job of finding exactly what you wanted.

Here's an example of just how good this tech is now. I forgot a name of a tv show one time and I typed in "movie with a clock and the key" into Google. Sure enough it found the show as the first result.

While we don't know how to make a general purpose AI right now, but there is a ton of work happening in that domain. I would be very surprised if we don't see a lot of progress there in the next few decades.

The AI doesn't have to be self improving, our brains aren't and we can do all the things that a digital assistant would need to do.

They have pretty bad discoverability. Users can only find out what works by a try->fail->try something else approach or by being told that it works like that.

Do you think that MS/AAPL/GOOG will go out of its way to collect your user data in particular, when it can get millions or billions of people's user data?

Do you think that MS/AAPL/GOOG doesn't have voice recognition for other languages? Did you look it up at all?

Do you think that MS/AAPL/GOOG won't get voice recognition for other languages in "10 years", given how much personally identifying data they can scoop up?

No, but I also know very few typical users that use voice controls extensively.

"Do you think that MS/AAPL/GOOG doesn't have voice recognition for other languages? Did you look it up at all?"

Voice controls in Lithuanian (my mother tongue) on Android didn't work until very recently (2015 Sep, according to Wiki) and it still works very poorly. If your primary language is not a mainstream one, you are out of luck. I'm sure it will get better, but it's not among the reasons I don't use it anyway (see below).

"Do you think that MS/AAPL/GOOG will go out of its way to collect your user data in particular, when it can get millions or billions of people's user data?"

I'm very pro-privacy, but it's not my main concern when talking about voice controls. The main drawback and reason why I hate it, is that talking breaks concentration and disrupts workflow. Another reason is that I don't like people around hearing what I'm doing, I can imagine a lot of anecdotal situations regarding "Computer, load PornHUB" etc. Also, it annoys other people around -- imagine a shared, dormitory like flat where all people are using voice controls at once.